Arkham Travel Guide - Justin Bell

I’ve now played the En Route gaming system—designed by Daniili Zaitsev, who also uses the pen name Dan Lièvre—nearly a dozen times, between plays of En Route: Special Edition through Innsmouth Travel Guide, the second game in the Travel Guide series. I recently got in a couple plays of Arkham Travel Guide, and although these are different games, they scratch the same itch: elevated roll-and-write (or flip-and-write, using En Route’s base system), higher interaction, high-score affairs, perfect for solo play or exactly three players thanks to the game’s dice choice system that gets all players involved. (En Route was one of my top 10 games from 2025.)

This time around, players have to guide tourists around a 6x6 grid of Arkham, with a final route that scores the most points. There are four choices of “Old Ones”, boss characters which change the scoring rules for a given game, along with in-round bonuses if players hit specific spaces during their turn. All the hallmarks of the series remain: personal objectives, boosting scores by running routes along the appropriately-colored city blocks if players can get matching tourists, 10 rounds, solo challenges, a 30-to-40-minute playtime.

The ending of Arkham Travel Guide might turn some players…

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The Crew: Mission Deep Sea - Joseph Buszek

Despite my aversion to both cooperative and limited communication games, I really enjoyed The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine when it was released, mostly because I love new innovations on the trick-taking mechanic, and it definitely delivered in that aspect. However, I didn’t get it to the table that much because, despite the clever gameplay, I found it worked best when you could play through several missions with the same group of players, following the recommended mission difficulty progression. For me, trick-taking games are usually more enjoyable as a quick filler game. Once you pass a half an hour, most at the table have had their fun and are ready to move on. This is where The Crew sequel, Mission Deep Sea, comes in.

While The Crew: Mission Deep Sea still has a mission-based logbook and follows the same standard rules as its predecessor, it’s the task cards for each round that are, literally, game-changing. In the original, the task cards were all the same difficulty­: some combination of color and number, which you had to win in a trick. The difficulty was ramped up by the number of tasks and task tokens (which changes the order to win…

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An unpopular war. Protests in the streets. An authoritarian US leader sending troops to a major American city, employing violence against its own citizens. Obviously, I’m talking about the events of 1968 in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, which happens to be the theme of Chicago ’68, a game from designer Yoni Goldstein and published by The Dietz Foundation.

Running south on Lake Shore Drive, Heading into town

I hope you’ll spare some time for a little personal context before I get into my review. When I moved to Chicago in the summer of 1998 to attend film school, the only thing I knew about the city was that the Bulls had just won their 6th NBA Championship in the last 8 years (side note: they haven’t been to finals in the 28 years since). It was in one of my classes that we watched Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, a movie that takes place (and was partly shot) during the 1968 DNC riots. The film had an enormous impact on me and, along with the book Boss by legendary columnist Mike Royko, was my introduction to the modern history of the city I have called home for nearly 30 years.

Boss is the unauthorized biography of the late…

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